New advanced library format standard approved - Design & Test of Computers, IEEE

THE IEEE has recently approved the IEEE Std. 1603-2003 Advanced Library Format (ALF) standard, which specifies a modeling language for IC technology, cells, and block. ALF describes behavior, timing, power, signal integrity, physical abstraction, and the physical implementation rules of library elements (http://www.eda.org/alf). EDA applications can use ALF as a technology library description for celland block-based design. Traditionally, technology library descriptions are an afterthought for EDA application tools. Application-specific library formats abound; they supply just the data needed for a particular EDA tool. You cannot dissociate the data’s meaning from the tool. ALF reverses this principle, recognizing that silicon technology is the foundation for EDA tools and not the other way around. The idea is that EDA tools should recognize and comprehend the technology data described in ALF, just as a designer would use a datasheet or a data book of library elements to realize a design. In other words, the technology objects or library elements exist prior to and independently of a particular EDA tool. The Open Verilog International consortium initiated and supported the ALF project. OVI is the precursor of Accellera, which is today the most significant feeder organization for IEEE standards in EDA. These organizations gave the industry Verilog (IEEE 1364) and VHDL (IEEE 1076), as well as three design data formats: the Standard Delay Format (SDF) specified in IEEE 1497; and the Physical Design Exchange Format (PDEF) and the Standard Parasitic Exchange Format (SPEF), specified in IEEE 1481. As a starting point, ALF had to remain compatible with and similar to common industry practice in library modeling. At the same time, ALF had to be more comprehensive and forward looking than existing tool-specific library descriptions. As a format, ALF had to be simple and straightforward to facilitate its adoption by the user community. As a language, ALF had to offer semantics and description capabilities that allowed the construction of meaningful modeling data that are selfdescriptive and general enough for existing and new EDA applications.